An Indian restaurant without side orders of rice or naan bread, and with no sign of tikka masala, might seem unusual to many North East diners but that didn’t stop Dosa Kitchen being filled to the rafters during its opening weekend.

To those in the know, the clue to this particular type of cuisine is in the name.

The dosa, which was new to me, is “made from our own hand-crafted mix of de-husked black lentils and rice”, according to the menu.

This is staple fare in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu which is the inspiration for this new restaurant in Jesmond.

It takes the place of the Longhorns Barbecue Smokehouse which retrenched to Mosley Street, leaving this site open to anyone else keen to enter the highly competitive – and therefore risky – restaurant business.

Into the breach stepped Mathen Ganesan, a man with a ready smile and a radiant optimism which might just be justified by an extremely good idea.

Mathen Ganesan (Image: newcastle chronicle)

I don’t know. I’ve come to meet him just hours before the new restaurant’s first sitting because I’m intrigued by the idea of an “obsessive foodie” (the description in the press release) trying to counter the common British idea of what an Indian restaurant should be.

We sit at one of the wooden tables, with workmen still putting finishing touches to the place, and he tells me a little of his life and his vision for the place.

Mathen says his parents came to the North East in the 1970s.

His father, who was a doctor, has sadly passed away but his mother still lives in Newcastle.

Mathen went to the nearby Royal Grammar School and then studied microelectronics and software engineering at Newcastle University before earning a masters degree in telecommunications and business management at University College London.

“From there I’ve basically... well, you could call me a serial entrepreneur.

“I started up a few companies based in the US and sold them on. I currently manage an investment fund with Intellectual Ventures (IV).

“My boss, Nathan Myhrvold, set up the company after being chief strategist and chief technology officer at Microsoft.

“He’s a huge foodie. He wrote Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. It’s a six-volume tome dedicated to modern cooking techniques.”

Later Googling tells me IV is based in Bellevue, Washington State, named a few years ago by CNNMoney as the best place to launch a business.

Its website states: “IV isn’t shy about taking risks; we’re innovators. We’ve built the invention capital market from scratch and we continue to lead by example.”

Dosas, says Mathen, will be familiar to people in other parts of the UK but perhaps not so much here. They’re hardly new, though.

“According to our research they’ve been around for a couple of thousand years,” says my host.

“It’s basically a lentil and rice pancake. We grind up rice and black grain lentils and add some fenugreek seeds which activate the natural yeasts in the mixture.

“It goes on a hot griddle to cook like a cr

êpe but the finished dosa is crispy and soft at the same time.”

At this point Sudharsan emerges from the kitchen with two sample dishes.

There’s the dosa, like a giant crispy roll spilling off the plate, and a dish of medhu vada. The menu describes them as a “fluffy, crispy lentil starter with onion, fresh coriander, green chillies, curry leaves and black pepper”. They look a bit like doughnuts.

Both dishes are accompanied by small pots of coconut chutney and other relishes.

The idea is that you tear bits off and dunk – which we do. And while this is not a review, I will say that if this is typical Dosa Kitchen, I’ll be back. It is light but satisfying food, subtly flavoured and fun to eat.

It is the food, says Mathen, that he and Sudharsan were brought up on. In Mathen’s case that is really something because he’s a Geordie, born and bred. His mother found the ingredients and served up the taste of Tamil Nadu on a regular bases.

Along with its namesake speciality, Dosa Kitchen also serves a selection of South Indian curries and biryanis, which is where you will find rice.

And as for drinks, well, Mathen teamed up with nearby Wylan Brewery to choose a selection of DK beers, notably Chola Kings, a light draft Pilsner at £3.95 a pint. “That was the most fun afternoon,” smiles Mathen.

Many diners might finish with a coffee which will be of the South Indian variety. Finer than some people might be used to, says the boss, and with very slow percolation.

So what is the future for this new kid on the block?

“From what I’ve observed,” says Mathen, “the Geordie public are quite unforgiving of something not quite up to the mark.

“We see a lot of restaurants come and go but the ones that are around for a long time are the ones that don’t let their standards drop.

“One reason we started life as a pop-up was so we could guage how what we wanted to do would be received.

“One thing we have said is that we will not be adapting the food to the customers.

“You hear this talk about giving the customers what they want but we want to move away from that. We say: let’s give customers something we think is really fabulous, something they don’t know they want yet.”

There speaks an innovator whose CV suggests he is pretty nifty with a calculated risk.